Citing weaknesses in security controls at 24 major agencies, a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) charts the stellar rise in incidents, and tries to highlight what went wrong. Just today my colleague Stephen Cobb also posted a government-related incident in the health care sector. The timeframe of the study, starting in

Unless you specifically cancel the 2-way communication aspect, the default setting will be to continue a communication link to OnStar once the subscription expires, raising the ire of customers who wonder what the company does with the data. OnStar says that data is anonymized, but customers fear data showing current vehicle location doesn’t seem very

This morning we recorded a podcast posing the question “can legislation solve cybercrime?” Well, The Senate Judiciary Committee seems eager to play a part, passing a measure yesterday attempting to thwart computer attacks. Measure S.1151 sets a national standard for data breach notification, replacing the various state initiatives already in place. It also makes concealing

Google+ seems to be continuing building steam and putting itself on the map as a contender, not merely an also-ran to the Facebook behemoth. Part of its strategy is to enforce the use of real names, not just the more common online pseudonym. The logic goes that this will reduce the likelihood that cybercriminals might

Since 2010 that is, following a law enacted in 2007 that requires all companies doing business in Massachusetts to inform consumers and state regulators about security breaches that might result in identity theft. Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office released the information, including a breakdown of the data. It seems her office received 1,166 data breach

Following the recent spree of data breaches at Sony, resulting in a bevy of class-action lawsuits, it has updated the Terms of Service to preclude future class action suits from being leveled. To be sure, Sony has had sleepless nights following the breaches, but they’d prefer not to deepen the stack of lawsuits if similar

Following the plight of the oft-storied WikiLeaks organization, we see a new variant to hit the streets soon, GlobaLeaks. Apparently WikiLeaks has garnered a bit of a following with the community, along with the attraction of a fair share of consternation from governments around the world. This new effort attempts to extend that further. Law

Forensic software developer PassWare announced a new version of its eponymous software forensics kit on Tuesday. Already several news sources are writing about how the program can automatically obtain the login password from a locked or sleeping Mac simply by plugging in a USB flash drive containing their software and connecting it to another computer

With the proliferation of the data we hold on our mobile devices, it’s no wonder Neil Daswani, CTO of Dasient, says around 8% of the apps they tested have been leaking data. In a similar vein, he states, “The number of malware samples on mobile devices has doubled in the past two years.” Google tends

At least I don’t have to use the “S” word today! A New York Times story reports that Citigroup has disclosed that it had suffered a data breach that disclosed information about approximately 1% of its North American credit card holders. Based upon Citi’s annual report this would be about 210,000 affected customers. According to

It’s been a really rough time for Sony. I have a hunch that in the past month “Sony CTO” has leapt past toilet cleaner on the list of least desirable jobs. Last month there was the massive Sony PlayStation/Qriocity breach that leaked more data than a Wall Street ticker leaks stock prices. Then a Sony

The US Department of Justice's announcement yesterday of the takedown of the command and control (C&C) servers for the Coreflood bots (detected by ESET as Win32/AFCore) and seizure of their domains marks another step in the growing awareness that crime, whether it is committed with bullets or with botnets, is still crime. This particular botnet,

As David Harley blogged earlier, the Comptroller of Public Accounts office for the state of Texas yesterday began notifying state employees that the names, addresses, social security numbers and other records of some 3.5 million current or former state employees had been accessible via the Internet. Unlike the earlier Epsilon Data Management data breach, it seems

Plenty more (potential) phish in the C:: The consequences of the Epsilon breach may have been a little overstated, but the Texas data exposures are far from trivial. Every picture tells a story: Your smartphone might be giving away more information than you really want to share. David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP ESET Senior Research

I'll see your Epsilon mail addresses and raise you 3 1/2 million Texans' personal records. While the Epsilon leak got an excessive amount of media attention, given its limited potential for phishing (let alone spear phishing), it seems bizarre that there hasn't been much more attention paid to the exposure of all those employment/retirement records exposed for,

[C. Nicholas Burnett, the manager for ESET LLC's tier three technical support, contributed the following guest blog article on the FireSheep plugin for Firefox. Thank you very much, Carl! Aryeh Goretsky] The past several days have seen the security community abuzz about a program presented in San Diego at ToorCon 12 this last weekend called

My assessment is that this could be a strong leap forward in support of Community Driven Open Source Privacy. Another assessment is that if corporate decision makers aren’t incentivized either internally by a supportive Corporate Culture or externally by regulation, getting the entire grip on cybersecurity is going to be difficult if not impossible. One final assessment is that this gap is crying out for a Cybersecurity / Personal Data Security BBB-type organization’s seal of approval to provide comfort to those who frequent the business. The hard question comes into how scalable this could be.

The Internet is abuzz with the announcement from Verisign’s iDefense Labs that a criminal hacker on a Russian forum who goes by the nom-de-plume "Kirllos" (Carlos?) is selling the credentials for 1.5 million Facebook accounts in batches of a thousand for between $8 and $30, depending upon their quality (which, in this case, means dates